I'm playing the Game of the Year Edition on Steam - how do I get these mods and install them, exactly? There doesn't seem to be a Steam workshop page for it.
Thanks for all the tips! To be honest, I'm really not worried about becoming powerful, as long as there's more places to see and explore without getting instantly killed. It sounds like I'll be able to go for quite a while without worrying about getting stronger.
EDIT: By the way, I haven't come across any bugs yet, and visually the game looks pretty good to me so far. Not sure if it's just my love of older games, or if the version I'm playing is already updated in some way. It does seem to include 2 expansions.
The mods are available here:
I am linking you straight to one of the greatest mods of all: Antares big mod which adds depth and roleplay rather than graphics and power. Specifically the mod allows you to act as a real member of a Morrowind organization up to Patriarch or archmage. It lets you hire scouts to lead you places, agents to give you info or help you out with bounties, thieves to steal and assassins to assassinate.
Antares integrates all this fairly smoothly, even fitting it with the lore (thus good luck getting Ashlander scouts to guide you to an ashlander tomb, or hiring assassins against a member of the Camonna Tong or any great house: only the Morag tong will handle that, and even then its a bit tricky). Instead of "Patriarch" being just a pretty title with no reduction in ordinator sneering, you get the ability to anathema people from the temple, to order ordinators around etc etc. It is an amazing bit of work.
I also love the passive cliff races mod (makes them peaceful unless diseased or blighted), the multiple mark mod (allows you to mark and recall to up to 10 locations rather than one, opens a chat menu to choose when you cast either spell), and the necromancy mod (forget which one) which drops the permanent summons scrolls in tombs all across the land, so you have to find them like a real grave robber. If you want to play a werewolf the mod which regionalizes and temporalizes wereful recognition to small areas is vital: otherwise one exposure and the whole world is hostile. The "you are being mugged" mod is perfect for playing bandits since it let's you rob people without killing them.
Basically mods in Morrowind are awesome. The community is insane and makes projects of staggering ambition (Tamriel rebuilt which sought and still seeks to build, as it says on the tin, the rest of the Tamriel continent around Morrowind)
As far as leveling. In Morrowind it is rather easy to become powerful fast. Brokenly easy actually. I don't know what class you picked, but there is almost certainly a way to level endlessly in it: magic you can make a cantrip costing one mana and practice casting it before resting gaining levels quickly, or you can jump around everywhere with acrobatics. I like the feeling of mid-level epicness, no longer easy meat, but not a walking reincarnation of the god of war that you become later in the game. At this point I know the game well enough that assembling the (incomplete~ damn that pauldron) Daedric armor with daedric crescent and some insane rings is dull. I like my character's stylishly dressed in light netch leather armor (chitin for ashland trips) and/ or expensive clothing I've enchanted, which lets me breathe water, fly and teleport to a safe location if I am threatened.
What I like to do to facilitate these play styles is pace my leveling process. Otherwise, I get too powerful, have to up the difficulty and end up in bloodmoon, which has a bad habit of ending my characters as I stubbornly try not to get bored with the obligations of werewolfdom, and inevitably do.
To control my leveling: I pick armor skills and magic skills for all my major and minor skills: they are slow to level, but you can grind them if you need to and they come with spells. I pick one weapon skill just for early survival, but rarely use that weapon in practice. I almost always take speechcraft and acrobatics (hard to level, slow to level, important). The result is say: Acrobatics, Speechcraft, Mysticism, Sneak, Illusion for major Marksman, alteration, light armor, medium armor, heavy armor for minor.
I pick minor and major skills not on the basis of which I want to be more powerful (cheaper to train low skills), but which I want to be high now: thus I want acrobatics to maneuver now, sneak to succeed now, mysticism to make me a billion dollars in trapped souls, speechcraft to succeed now etc